Part 8 (1/2)
Barely submerged rocks crowding the bank compelled us to wade in and lift the boat ahead even oftener than in Surprise Rapids. Andy always took the lead in this, but time after time my help was necessary to throw her clear. For the first time since I had boated in Alaska a good many years previously, I began to know the numbing effects of icy water.
The heavy exertion did a lot to keep the blood moving, but three or four minutes standing with the water up to mid-thigh sent the chill right in to the marrow of the bones, even when sweat was running off the face in streams. That started a sort of dull ache in the leg bones that kept creeping higher and higher the longer one remained in the water. That ache was the worst part of it; the flesh became dead to sensation very quickly, but that penetrating inward pain had more hurt in it every minute it was prolonged. It was bad enough in the legs, but when, submerged to the waist, as happened every now and then, the chill began to penetrate to the back-bone and stab the digestive organs, it became pretty trying. One realized then what really short shrift a man would have trying to swim for more than four or five minutes even in calm water of this temperature. That was about the limit for heart action to continue with the cold striking in and numbing the veins and arteries, a doctor had told Blackmore, and this seemed reasonable. Andy was repeatedly sick at the stomach after he had been wet for long above the waist. My own qualms were rather less severe (doubtless because I was exposed rather less), but I found myself very weak and unsteady after every immersion. A liberal use of rum would undoubtedly have been of some help for a while, but Blackmore was adamant against starting in on it as long as there was any bad water ahead. And as there was nothing but bad water ahead, this meant that--in one sense at least--we were a ”dry s.h.i.+p.”
I shall not endeavour to trace in detail our painful progress down ”Twenty-One-Mile.” Indeed, I could not do so even if I wanted, for the very good reason that my hands were so full helping with the boat all the way that I had no time to make notes, and even my mental record--usually fairly dependable--is hopelessly jumbled. Even Blackmore became considerably mixed at times. At the first four or five riffles below the lake he called the turn correctly, landing, lining, crossing and running just where he should have done so. Then his mind-map became less clear. Twice he lined riffles which it presently became plain we could have run, and then he all but failed to land above one where a well-masked ”souse-hole” would have gulped the boat in one mouthful.
It was at this juncture that I asked him why he had never taken the trouble of making a rough chart of this portion of the river, so that he could be quite sure what was ahead. He said that the idea was a good one, and that it had often occurred to him. There were several reasons why he had never carried it out. One was, that he was always so mad when he was going down ”Twenty-One-Mile” that he couldn't see straight, let alone write and draw straight. This meant that the chart would be of no use to him, even if some one else made it--unless, of course, he brought the maker along to interpret it. The main deterrent, however, had been the fact that he had always sworn each pa.s.sage should be his last, so that (according to his frame of mind of the moment) there would be no use for the chart even if he could have seen straight enough to make it, and to read it after it had been made.
The scenery--so far as I recall it--was grand beyond words to describe.
Cliff fronted cliff, with a jagged ribbon of violet-purple sky between.
Every few hundred yards creeks broke through the mountain walls and came cascading into the river over their spreading boulder ”fans.” Framed in the narrow notches from which they sprang appeared transient visions of sun-dazzled peaks and glaciers towering above wedge-shaped valleys swimming full of lilac mist. I saw these things, floating by like double strips of movie film, only when we were running in the current; when lining I was aware of little beyond the red line of the gunwale which I grasped, the imminent loom of Andy's grey-s.h.i.+rted shoulder next me, and the foam-flecked swirl of liquefied glacier enfolding my legs and swiftly converting them to stumpy icicles.
There was one comfort, though. The farther down river we worked away from the lake, the shorter became the stretches of lining and the longer the rapids that were runnable. That accelerated our progress materially, but even so Blackmore did not reckon that there was time to stop for pictures, or even for lunch. We were still well up to schedule, but he was anxious to work on a good margin in the event of the always-to-be-expected ”unexpected.” It was along toward three in the afternoon that, after completing a particularly nasty bit of lining a mile or two above the mouth of Yellow Creek, he came over and slapped me on the back. ”That finishes it for the day, young man,” he cried gaily.
”We can turn loose and run the rest of it now, and we'll do it h.e.l.l sizzling fast. It may also rejoice you to know that all the lining left for the whole trip is a couple of hundred yards at 'Rock Slide' and Death Rapids. All aboard for the Ferry!”
All of a sudden life had become a blessed thing again. For the first time I became aware that there were birds singing in the trees, flowers blooming in the protected shelves above high-water-mark, and maiden-hair ferns festooning the dripping grottoes of the cliffs. Dumping the water from our boots, Andy and I resumed our oars and swung the boat right out into the middle of the current. The first rapid we hit was a vicious side-winder, shaped like a letter ”S,” with overhanging cliffs playing battledore-and-shuttlec.o.c.k with the river at the bends. Blackmore said he would have lined it if the water had been two feet lower; as it was now we would get wetter trying to worry a boat round the cliffs than in slas.h.i.+ng through. We got quite wet enough as it was. The rocks were not hard to avoid, but banging almost side-on into the great back-curving combers thrown off by the cliffs was just a bit terrifying. Slammed back and forth at express-train speed, with nothing but those roaring open-faced waves buffeting against the cliffs, was somewhat suggestive of the sensation you get from a quick double-bank in a big biplane. Only it was wetter--much wetter. It took Blackmore ten minutes of hard bailing to get rid of the splas.h.a.ge.
The succeeding rapids, though no less swift, were straighter, and easier--and dryer. Roos, perched up in the bow, announced that all was over but the digging, and started to sing ”Old Green River.” Andy and I joined in l.u.s.tily, and even Blackmore (though a lip-reader would have sworn he was mumbling over a rosary) claimed to be singing. Exultant as we all were over the prize so nearly within our grasp, we must have put a world of feeling into that heart-stirring chorus.
”I was drifting down the old Green River On the good s.h.i.+p _Rock-and-Rye_-- I drifted too far; I got stuck on the bar; I was out there alone, Wis.h.i.+ng that I were home--
The Captain was lost, with all of the crew, So that there was nothing left to do; And I had to drink the whole Green River dry-igh To get back ho-ohm to you-oo-ou!”
Smoother and smoother became the going, and then--rather unexpectedly, it seemed to me--the water began to slacken its dizzy speed. Blackmore appeared considerably puzzled over it, I thought. Roos, turning sentimental, had started singing a song that he had learned from a phonograph, and in which, therefore, appeared numerous hiati.
”Now I know da-da-da-da-da-- Now I know the reason why-- Da-da-da-da----da-da-da-daah-- Now I know, yes, now I know!
Da-da-da, my heart....”
Blackmore frowned more deeply as the treble wail floated back to him, and then broke into the next ”da-da” with a sudden growl. ”I say, young feller,” he roared, slapping sharply into the quieting water with his paddle blade; ”if you know so _geesly_ much, I'm wondering if you'd mind loosening up on one or two things that have got _me_ buffaloed. First place, do I look like a man that had took a shot of hop?” ”Not at all, sir,” quavered Roos, who seemed rather fearful of an impending call-down. ”I don't, huh?” went on the growl. ”Then please tell me why what I knows is a ten-mile-an-hour current looks to me like slack water, and why I think I hear a roar coming round the next bend.” ”But the water _is_ slack,” protested Roos, ”and I've heard that roar for five minutes _myself_. Just another rapid, isn't it? The water always....”
”Rot!” roared the veteran. ”There ain't no fall with a rip-raring thunder like that 'tween Yellow Creek and Death Rapids. Rot, I tell you!
I must ha' been doped after all.”
Nevertheless, when that ground-shaking rumble a.s.sailed us in a raw, rough wave of savage sound as we pulled round the bend, Blackmore was not sufficiently confident of his ”dope theory” to care to get any nearer to it without a preliminary reconnaissance. Landing a hundred yards above where a white ”eyelash” of up-flipped water showed above a line of big rocks, we clambered down along the right bank on foot.
Presently all that had occurred was written clear for one who knew the way of a slide with a river, and the way of a river with a slide, to read as on the page of a book.
”A new rapid, and a whale at that!” gasped Blackmore in astonishment; ”the first one that's ever formed on the Columbia in my time!”
The amazing thing that had happened was this: Sometime in the spring, a landslide of enormous size, doubtless started by an avalanche of snow far up in the Selkirks, had ripped the whole side of a mountain out and come down all the way across the river. As the pines were hurled _backward_ for a couple of hundred feet above the river on the right or Rocky Mountain bank, it seemed reasonable to believe that the dam formed had averaged considerably more than that in height. As this would have backed up the river for at least ten or twelve miles, it is probable that the lake formed must have been rising for a number of days before it flowed over the top of the barrier and began to sluice it away. On an incalculably larger scale, it was just the sort of thing we had heard and seen happening on Trident Creek, opposite our Kinbasket Lake camp.
Not the least remarkable thing in connection with the stupendous convulsion was the fact that a large creek was flowing directly down the great gash torn out by the slide and emptying right into the rapid which was left when the dam had been washed away. Blackmore was quite positive that there had been no creek at this point the last time he was there.
It seemed reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the slide, in removing a considerable section of mountain wall, had opened a new line of drainage for some little valley in the high Selkirks.
It was the great, rough fragments of cliff and native rock left after the earth had been sluiced out of the dam that remained to form the unexpected rapid which now confronted us. They had not yet been worn smooth like the rest of the river boulders, and it was this fact, doubtless, that gave the cascade tumbling through and over them such a raw, raucous roar.
The solution of the mystery of the appearance of the rapid was only an incident compared with the problem of how to pa.s.s it. There was a comparatively straight channel, but there was no possibility that the boat could live in the huge rollers that billowed down the middle of it.
Just to the right of the middle there was a smoother chute which looked better--provided the boat could be kept to it. Blackmore said that it looked like too much of a risk, and decided to try to line down the right bank--the one on which we had landed. As the river walls were too steep and broken to allow any of the outfit to be portaged, the boat would have to go through loaded.
A big uprooted pine tree, extending out fifty feet over the river and with its under limbs swept by the water, seemed likely to prove our worst difficulty, and I am inclined to believe it would have held us up in the end, even after we reached it. As things turned out, however, it troubled us not a whit, for the boat never got down that far. Right at the head of the rapid her bows jammed between two submerged boulders about ten feet from the bank, and there she stuck. As it was quickly evident that it was out of the question to lift her on through, it now became a problem of working her back up-stream out of the jaws that held her. But with the full force of the current driving her tighter between the rocks, she now refused to budge even in the direction from which she had come.
As I look back on it now, the fifteen minutes Andy and I, mid-waist deep in the icy water, spent trying to work that hulking red boat loose so that Blackmore could haul her back into quiet water for a fresh start takes pride of place as the most miserable interval of the whole trip.